I’m stuck for a minute, trying to remember what she was laughing about. Staring at Elora. And the space where I should have been. When I finally look up, Honey is watching me.
“You feel her,” she says. “You’ve always said you didn’t have the gift, but I’ve never believed it.”
“No.” I wrap the muffin back up and set it aside. “It’s not like that. I just keep expecting her to show up, you know?”
I want to ask Honey the same question I wanted to ask Evie. I want to ask if she knows – for sure – whether Elora is still alive. But I don’t. I’m afraid to hear the answer.
Honey is an old-school spiritualist at heart. A true medium. She believes that the spirits of the dead exist and that they have the ability to communicate directly with the living. If they want to.
For Honey, they communicate mostly through visions. She reads tea leaves and stuff like that, but that’s just for the tourists on day trips down from New Orleans. The real stuff she keeps to herself these days. She says nobody wants to listen to the wisdom of the dead any more. They just want to know when their boyfriends are going to propose. Or if they’ll win the lottery. And the dead, Honey says, don’t give a shit about stuff like that. They have bigger fish to fry.
I tear my eyes away from Elora’s frozen laugh, and Honey is still watching me. “Every year you remind me more of your mother,” she tells me, and I know the resemblance she sees goes deeper than our chestnut hair, our big green eyes, and the freckles scattered across our noses. “Always keeping the most important pieces of yourself tucked away somewhere.”
The little bell over the door jingles, and I look up, thinking maybe it really will be Elora standing there and this whole thing will be over. We’ll rip down the missing posters and toss the flyers in the trash. Then I’ll tell her I’m sorry, and she’ll forgive me. And everything will be the way it’s always been.
The way it’s supposed to be.
But it isn’t Elora. It’s Hart.
And I guess that’s the next best thing.
Before I even have a chance to say hello, Hart’s made it around the counter and has me wrapped up in a hug so tight it hurts. His arms are strong. Familiar. And I finally let myself melt into the safety of home. The soft sound of the bead curtain tells me Honey has slipped into the back room to give us some privacy.
“Evie told me you were here.” Hart’s voice sounds different than it did last summer. Deeper. Or maybe just sadder. I talked to him on the phone in February, when he called to tell me about Elora. But that conversation had been so weird. Short and confusing. We weren’t used to talking to each other on the phone. And we were both upset. He hadn’t offered a lot of details, and I’d been too stunned to ask questions. As soon as I hung up, it almost seemed like maybe it wasn’t real. Like I’d imagined the whole phone call.
But now it’s definitely real. This hug makes it real.
Hart is the oldest of us all. The first of ten. Born in late March, almost three months before Elora and I came into the world on the same day in June. He’s technically Elora’s stepbrother, but the “step” part never mattered to us. And I’ve always thought of him as my big brother, too. Sometimes he played with us. Sometimes he tormented us. Occasionally he kicked someone’s ass on our behalf. But he was always there. Hart’s mama married Elora’s daddy when we were six years old, but in our minds, that only cemented what we already knew – that the three of us belonged to each other.
Three peas in a pod.
Three coins in the fountain.
Our very own three-ring circus.
Hart and Elora and Grey. Grey and Elora and Hart.
Hart was just a month shy of seventeen when Elora disappeared back in February, but when he called me that next day, he sounded so much younger. He sounded like he had when we were little.
He sounded scared.
“How you holding up?” I ask him. Evie was right. He looks like he hasn’t eaten or slept in weeks.
“It’s rough, Greycie.” He pulls back to look at me. “How ’bout you?”
I shrug. “It’s better, being here, I think.”
I’d wanted to come right at the beginning – I started packing as soon as I got that phone call from Hart – but my dad wouldn’t let me. We had a screaming, door-slamming fight about it that lasted most of a week. I couldn’t afford the time off school, he’d said. Not at the tail end of my junior year, with track season getting ready to start.